3 entries categorized "Supreme Court"

March 11, 2015

Half a century after the Selma March, race still matters in America as events in Selma, Alabama, Madison, Wisconsin and Norman, Oklahoma demonstrated. Here's my take in my Chicago Defender column

From Selma to Madison to Norman

MonroeAnderson

Defender Columnist

The march, a shooting and a song summed up this past weekend just how far this nation has gone and just how far it has yet to go.

The nation’s first African American president stood near the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to mark the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” one of the most important feats of the Civil Rights Movement. Out of the epic confrontation between forces of peace and progress and the agents of brute force, Blacks won the right to vote in the South.

“We just need to open our eyes and our ears and our hearts to know that this nation’s racial history still cast it’s long shadow upon us,” President Barack Obama told the integrated crowd of thousands who had gathered to commemorate, along with him, the Selma to Montgomery March. “We know the march is not yet over. We know the race is not yet won.”

As if to underscore the president’s point, some 898 miles north from Selma, in Madison, Wisconsin, another white cop shot and killed another unarmed black teenager and some 783 miles northwest of Selma, in Norman, Oklahoma, a YouTube video went viral exposing tuxedo-clad white frat boys chanting a bus-trip song about racial exclusion and lynching.

The lyrics to the song were not exactly surprising, considering that Sigma Alpha Epsilon is 159 years old and is the only national fraternity founded in the Antebellum South. The fraternity boasts on its website that during the Civil War 92 percent of SAE members fought for the Confederate states.

In case you missed the video or didn’t catch the lyrics, here they are in all of their good ol’ boy, old-fashioned, garden-variety racist glory:

"There will never be a ni**** in SAE.

There will never be a ni**** in SAE.

You can hang him from a tree, but he can never sign with me

There will never be a ni**** in SAE."

I find this alarming because this isn’t a bunch of curmudgeonly, bitter old white men hating on hope and change but young guys who are white America’s future. After these frat boys graduate from college, they’ll move on into the corporate pipeline where some day some of them will have the power to hire and fire with “there will never be a ni**** “ playing like the soundtrack to their lives in their heads.

The SAE chanters may represent a throwback to mid-century American racism, but times have changed. Rather than stonewall the Unheard, a group of Black student activists at OU who had learned of the video and posted it online, or buy time with a three-month investigation, David Boren, the university president, immediately shut the fraternity down.

The national headquarters of SAE, which prides itself in having a membership of “gentlemen and leaders.” followed Boren’s lead and immediately suspended the OU chapter.

With no blood thirsty state troopers or Selma police waiting to do battle, what was supposed to be a march was so well attended by so many movers and shakers that it turned into an extravaganza. Not only was America’s current president there but also former President George W. Bush, along with Capitol Hill lawmakers galore.

It was plainly easier to take photo-ops than it has been to pass a new voter’s rights law that would repair the damage the five right wing activists on the Supreme Court did two years ago to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that southern states that had historically suppressed the Black vote no longer had to prove they were no longer suppressing the Black vote. Since then, southern states like Texas has come up with all sorts of creative, new-fangled ways to diminish the number of Blacks and Browns casting their votes at the ballot box.

We can vote now but we can’t stop the unjustifiable killings of black men and boys by frightened or ferocious cops.

Even with the “Black Lives Matter” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” protests becoming this generation’s civil rights movement, policemen across the nation continue to create more martyrs.

Friday night a Madison policeman shot Tony Robinson, an unarmed biracial teen, five times in the chest. The 19-year-old Robinson had a file on his with a conviction last year for armed robbery and a diagnosis that he suffered from attention-deficit disorder and anxiety and depression.

Officer Matt Kenny, a 12-year veteran, has been put on paid administrative leave while the Wisconsin Department of Justice investigates the Robinson’s death. Kenny was involved in another fatal shooting in 2007, that was found justified; a so-called suicide by cop case.

So while Selma was throwing a grand party, 2,000 protesters, mainly Wisconsin students, have been peacefully marching in Madison while chanting, “Black lives matter.”

January 20, 2010

We saw what was to come a year ago when Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. sworn in President Barack Hussein Obama, Jr.

What should have been a smooth and seamless ceremony wasn't. Chief Justice Roberts got the words wrong. The new President had to go through the swearing-in later--one more time--in the Inaugural day to make sure everything was all right.

That omen to the chief from the chief would be replayed and replayed and replayed with different verses, but the same tune throughout Obama's first 365 days in office. While I seriously doubt that the swearing-in trip-up by Roberts, an activist conservative Supreme Court appointee, was designed to be an obstructionist gesture, it symbolizes what the activist, conservative Republican Party and its media movers and shakers had in store for Obama.

Since the double-dose Inaugural, day in and day out, week in and week out, month in and month out, our nation and its chief executive have been bludgeoned by one Republican road block to the next in a right-wing plot to assure that Obama's promise for change goes nowhere fast.

Right off there was the Birthers. According to them, Obama was not born in the United States therefore wasn't a legal citizen therefore was ineligible to be president. A little more than six months into office, the first African American president was still in early attempts to get the health reform legislation he promised through Congress when GOP Sen. Jim DeMint declared if Republicans and conservatives stop Obama on health care reform, it would “break him” and be Obama’s “Waterloo.”

After DeMint's declarations, the Birthers were joined by the Deathers--those that claimed that the Healthcare Reform Bill was designed to let senior citizens die--and the tea-baggers who were mad as hell as not going to take it any more because Obama was a foreign-born, socialist who was out to kill the unborn, old folks and truth, justice and the American way.

All along, the Republicans voted no while providing no variable alternative to all they were rejecting. As we come to the end of Obama's first year, the Republicans have helped to assure that 177 of the White House's nominees have not been appointed--that's 107 more than the 70 Bush nominees that were still waiting after his first year in office and one heck of a way to make sure that Obama can't do a good job.

So when Massachusetts' Brownie became the first Republican to win a U.S. Senate seat since Edward Brooke retired in 1979, on cue the conservatives to healthcare. Following suit, many of the MSM reports failed to point out months before Scott Brown beat Democrat Martha Coakley that the majority of Americans were in favor of healthcare reform until the right-wingers nay-sayed it to its deathbed. Nor did enough MSM reports explain that Massachusetts already has a healthcare reform law in place so the voters in that state were either fearful that a national reform law may cost them more or were pretty much into a "I got mine, I could care less about yours" state of mind.

As if we didn't know, the main history we've learned in the past year is that negative works; that it's easier to tear down than to build up and that nice guys get to experience firsthand that old saw about if at first you don't succeed, then try, try, try again.

June 26, 2008

I’m no constitutional scholar. And unlike Barack Obama, I certainly haven’t taught a course on constitutional law at anybody’s college, particularly one as prestigious as the University of Chicago. Still, I couldn’t disagree more with the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for president when he says he disagrees with the Supreme Court’s decisionoutlawing executions of convicted child rapists. Like the right-wing political activist Supremes, Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Samuel A. Alito, Jr. and Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., Obama fell in line with the murder-the-bastards side of the ruling. Predictably, so did Obama’s presumptive political opponent, John McCain. "Today's Supreme Court ruling is an assault on law enforcement's efforts to punish these heinous felons for the most despicable crime," McCain said. "That there is a judge anywhere in America who does not believe that the rape of a child represents the most heinous of crimes, which is deserving of the most serious of punishments, is profoundly disturbing." "I have said repeatedly that I think that the death penalty should be applied in very narrow circumstances for the most egregious of crimes," Obama said in his made-to-order statement for the nation’s conservatives. "I think that the rape of a small child, 6 or 8 years old, is a heinous crime, and if a state makes a decision that under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances, the death penalty is at least potentially applicable, that does not violate our Constitution." Who’s going to argue about whether or not raping a small child is a heinous crime? Who would argue that those who committed this particular crime aren’t sick mfs? But do we really want state sanctioned murder of these sickos? What does that accomplish? Is anybody sick enough to rape a 6 or 8 year old is not going to be deterred by the prospect of pulling down the death penalty? So, how do you stop them before they rape again? Wouldn’t locking them up for life, keeping them away from any other children, in and of itself, make for a safer society? And one last question while I’m at it: In his methodical march from the left to the middle, is Obama trying to out-McBush John McCain?